The Unique Way Dad Helps Baby Learn to Talk

Walk into any Mommy and Me class and you'll undoubtedly hear the babble of tots and the high pitched baby-centric talk of the mamas. And all that "motherese" makes sense. Numerous studies have shown that when adults speak in a high pitch range of tones and stretched out vowels, babies learn language.

But what about if you were to visit a Daddy and Me class? Would you hear the same higher pitched baby talk coming from the dads' mouths? Unlikely. A preliminary unpublished study to be presented at the Acoustical Society of America's meeting this week in Pittsburgh found that even when dads are interacting with their children, they are less likely to engage in the characteristic high-pitched baby talk that moms use.

But is that a problem? No, say the researchers from Washington State University. In fact, it's a bonus for the tots, who get to learn about language in a different — yet equally important — way from both their moms and their dads.

For their study, researchers outfitted preschoolers and their parents with recording devices to monitor their social interactions throughout the course of a normal day and then looked at the way the moms and dads spoke to their children compared to the way they spoke to other adults.

Their findings? Not surprisingly, they noticed that the mothers varied their manner of speech and used higher pitched tones when talking to their kids but not when interacting with adults. The fathers spoke pretty much in the same tone and intonation to their children as they did to adults they interacted with.

Researchers say that's a good thing. Why? The experts hypothesize that dads' manner of speaking acts as the bridge for the child between the familiar and comfortable home environment and the unfamiliar speech and environment of the outside world. In other words, dads are helping their children learn language skills in a complementary way to how moms help develop language skills.

As interesting as these findings and hypotheses are, the study's weakness is that it only looked at families with a mother and a father living full time at home with their child. And that means that it's unclear how the results might be different in single parent or same-sex families.

That said, what is clear is that little kids learn language from many different sources: from Mom or Dad, from a grandparent or babysitter, from a close family friend or an aunt or uncle. In fact, every interaction a tot has with an adult is another opportunity for him to be exposed to varied language styles, and any language-rich environment (no matter the gender of the speaker) will help your little one develop those language skills he'll need to navigate the world.